Friday, September 08, 2006

Best Friend

Putting John to bed last night:

"Night, John."

"Night, Daddy."

"I love you."

"Love you."

"Daddy?"

"Yeah?"

"You my best friend."

Perfect. If there was ever a minute to freeze-frame forever, that was it. If I had been eaten by sharks minutes later I would have died a happy, happy man.

Also, earlier in the evening I got choked up when they played the National Anthem before the football game. I told John to stand up and cover his heart (so he'll know what to do at the Tigers game this Friday) and he did. The Anthem gets me anyway, and add a patriotic kid to the mix? No chance.

***

It's been a good summer. Almost like a dream, really. Hot weather and lots of swimming at Julie's. Cooking out and drinking with friends. A pretty wife, a cute kid and a house in the suburbs. Things can change so much in a year it can make your head all spinny. If a movie changed things around that fast you'd be like, "totally fake. I don't buy it." But there it is.

A year ago yesterday was the day Sonya, James, Sonya's dad and I went to New Orleans to get some stuff from our apartment and my car. We left about 4:00 a.m. and didn't get back until about that time the next morning. We had guns, money, food and water. All we needed was a lawyer.

Things were still very raw then. The airport was a military base. No streetlights. The reek of uncollected garbage and the stronger, sewer stink blowing in from a few miles east where the Earhart Expressway dipped into the floodwater.

The apartments were a wreck, too. If you know the Creeks of River Ridge, you know it was a tidy place with big trees and walking paths and swimming pools. The trees were all down. The paths were covered with branches and shingles. The pools were the color of strong tea.

But we got what we could, stuffed into James' truck and my car. We put a can of fix-a-flat in the low tire on my car. My car still has tightly grouped scratches all over it, but I was lucky. Not fifty feet away a big oak had smashed another car flat.

I just had the presence of mind to park out in the open.

***

So things are good. We've come a long way. And now it's fall.

I didn't really enjoy fall last year, and that's a shame because it was a beauty. Memphis has a tendency to be drab and wet in the fall, with the rain and wind knocking the leaves off the trees before they change color. Not last year. It was dry and crisp for months, it felt like, and the leaves were bright and dry. There wasn't much fall in New Orleans (or winter, for that matter) so it's nice to be back.

"I was sitting outside the other night," Sonya said a few days ago, "and it was kind of cool and I was thinking about things that have happened at this time of year..."

Fall is evocative like no other season. Winter is cold and to be endured, and spring is a relief after winter. Summers are good, but one is very like another. Fall, though, is something else.

1 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

those are the best moments!
xoxoxoxo - give that boy a big kiss for us!
ann

9/12/2006 1:16 PM  

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